Antidotes for bruises, bites, and poisons were regarded as extremely important. One was called ambrosia, which Zopyrus is said to have compounded for the King Ptolemy; another was the celebrated antidote of King Mithridates.
The Greeks called their embrocations or ointments euchrista. The catapotia was the method used for internal administration in liquid form, for which many recipes are given by Celsus. The following will serve as an example:—
| Athenio’s Catapotia for a Cough. | |
| Myrrh, pepper, each | p.  i. |
| Castor, poppy tears, each | p. i. |
which are bruised separately and afterwards mixed.
For venomous bites, the treatment of the ancients, if the wound was severe, was first cupping, or, if slight, the plaster of Diogenes was applied, or a salt fish bound over the wound. A curious remedy practised by the Greeks for hydrophobia was to throw the patient suddenly into a pond, and “if he could not swim let him sink several times, and thus drink; if he can swim, keep him down at times until he may be satiated with water, for thus at once,” writes Celsus, “is both the thirst and the dread of water removed”.
Their antidote for nearly all poisons was warm oil, given in order to induce vomiting.
The word collyrium, now applied to a lotion for the eyes, was also used by the ancients; but they gave it a greater latitude, and also employed it to describe a composition of powders wrought to a pasty consistence with a liquid, and formed into something like a tent for insertion into cavities.
Of the chemical bodies and drugs known both to the Greeks and the Romans, the number is not a few.
Cinnabar, which seems to have been known from a very remote period, was the name applied to the red sulphide of mercury, and also to dragon’s blood. It is doubtless of the latter Pliny says “he believed to be the gore of a dragon crushed by the weight of a dying elephant, with a mixture of the blood of these animals”. Copperas, lead, alum, copper, and iron were used as styptics.